Re: House of Glass

From: Tim O'Connor <oconnort@nyu.edu>
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 15:18:21 EDT

On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 07:32:09PM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:

> It is interesting, isn't it? When it comes down to it, all a writer
> has in the way of raw materials, the substances of his craft,
> are the memory traces from his own life. Yet the most vivid
> writers - those who give the strongest impression of writing
> 'autobiographically' - have often been those who, working
> on the reports of others were able with their imagination to
> adapt their own experiences & assemble them into an even
> more 'real-feeling' reality than was available to those participating
> in the 'original' events.

Exactly ... I could not have phrased it better, and if I tried I would
have phrased it a lot worse.

> I'm thinking, of course, of my old obsession Ernie H. who,
> having spent only a day or two at the actual front reconstructed
> one of his great masterpieces, the retreat from Caporetto,
> by borrowing the second-hand accounts of those who had
> actually been there, plus news reports, plus geographical studies
> of the terrain, plus his own memories of lying in an ambulance
> with a macerated knee. So that people who - unlike him -
> HAD been there were, after reading his stuff, compelled to say:
> 'THAT's the way it was....'

Ah, old Ernie. Best example there ever was of a writer playing all
parts of the field. When he wrote prose shaped to be consciously
artful (as in those early, gorgeously lean sketches and stories) he
managed to make it seem that you were present for all of it.

When he wrote thinly veiled facts (as in The Sun Also Rises), he had
people scrambling around to prove they were not involved (or, in some
cases, try desperately to prove that they were indeed involved or
present).

But when he wrote what I sometimes refer to as "how I wish it had been"
fiction, which is a close cousin to "ah, if only it had been" fiction --
in Ernest's case, both embarrassingly involving the "what might have
been" of attractive women who were for one reason or another out of
his reach -- he only parodied himself, and then trained a strong
spotlight on his longings and his conscious or unconscious wishes.

I guess that the picture of women is a real toss-up when you consider
which has greater staying power: the heartbreaking portrait of thinly
veiled life in The Sun Also Rises; or the imaginary, idealized woman of
A Farewell to Arms, who led in part, as you say, to the creation of the
astonishingly accurate picture of Caporetto and the other military
ventures (even if the picture of Catherine was at least in part --
according to some observers -- Hemingway's guilt-laced, post-divorce
portrait of Hadley); the poetic real-life memory of his first marriage
as shown in A Moveable Feast, which to this day carries plenty of weight
when it comes to seeing how he felt about Hadley, the one wife he
never took swipes at publicly or privately; or the various nasties who
appear in short stories and even in such work as Green Hills of Africa.
(You wonder what kept him in such a marriage so long.)

It's astonishing to see how he runs the gamut from one female
archetype to another, never quite settling on any particular one.

Thanks for a post that made me think quite a bit, about a writer I can
never put out of my mind for very long, anyhow!

--tim

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Received on Wed Aug 21 15:18:25 2002

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